Recent reviews by utopianmachine

If you like Animal Crossing and Disney, you should have already bought Dreamlight Valley.

When you first start to play Puzzle Quest 3, you might wonder why the reviews are not more positive. The character classes, colorful gem-matching, and decent game mechanics will pull you in. You'll delight in finding equipment and loot, looking forward to what comes next. Chapter One will end, and you may feel fairly excited for what is ahead. It won't take long for that feeling to leave you.

As you move into Chapter Two, many game options open up to you. Hunts, Quests, Player Matches all provide additional content that soon feels meaningless. You must wait in real-time for chests to unlock, which may take up to a day. You'll only be able to progress in the main story so far before you'll find you must level up gear and spells. You'll do meaningless missions for the sake of loot, only to be disappointed when you don't get anything better than you already have. The story missions become too hard to move forward, and then you're just stuck in a loop of doing these pointless loot missions.

It doesn't take long before you forget what the story was. The game, pretty as it is, is just a match-3 time-waster. There is the potential for something really good in here, but it got bogged down at some point trying to be some freemium product. Those with fond memories of Puzzle Quest 1 and 2 may rather go back and replay those games. This one doesn't deserve your time.

Plantera is an inspired clicker which brings something different to the table. The Phelphers tend the garden that you plant, and they gather the resources which fall from trees and grow from the ground. More trees, bushes, and vegetables to plant are unlocked quickly, as are animals to populate your garden. Unfortunately, that's about where the game ends. You can expand your garden and, essentially, do more and more of the same thing on a larger scale. Rinse and repeat.

Unfortunately, Plantera feels like the beginnings of a core experience which were never fully fleshed out. Far more variety is needed to help this game compete with all the other clicker experiences in the marketplace. As it is now, you simply run out of things to do far too fast, and your bustling garden becomes little more than congested scenery.

It doesn't take long before you will ask yourself, "Why am I still playing this game?"

There is little sense of progression, and it feels meaningless. The multipliers stack and stack, but so what? There is no story, no characters, and virtually no sense of player choice. Before long, you are resetting game progress to collect Angels every other day or two, and it is at this point that the grind becomes arbitrary.

If you are looking for time-wasting freemium games, there are definitely better choices out there.

I will admit it: at first, I didn't like Journal. The main character comes across as an unlikable narrator. As other negative reviews have mentioned, she steals, lies, and hurts her friends. It's hard to find anything to like about her as you begin her story.

But then the experience broadens, and you begin to see some of the reasons why she is making poor choices. One of the girl's regrettable experiences hit home so much that I was emotionally jarred. Perhaps because I was also once a teenage girl, I found myself relating heavily to her story. You watch as she struggles through the realities of divorce, relationships, death, and the daily nonsense of life. It is an extremely personal tale, and I was floored by what the game achieved. I could have easily been that girl, through some of the ways she related to others and the choices she made. I didn't like myself then, and the girl in the game doesn't like herself now. Journal is in some ways a tragic work. How much you like the game will possibly depend on how much you relate to her and her journey.

There are some minor flaws in the experience. It can be difficult at times to determine where the next conversation trigger is, so that you may talk to some individuals multiple times fruitlessly, trying to figure out what you're supposed to do. You will wander over the same settings again and again, although this is accomplished at a pretty brisk pace that never feels too cumbersome. Some of the dialoge choices could be clearer; at times, I was unsure what my character was getting ready to communicate by the options.

Still, for the flaws, I absolutely recommend Journal. It blends painful realism with touches of imagination that create a story that can stun you in the accomplishment of its narrative arc. I applaud Locked Door Puzzle for what they've made: Journal is a piece of art.

If you enjoyed 10000000, you will enjoy You Must Build a Boat. It is essentially more of the same, with some additional layers of complexity which help the experience feel more rounded.

You will probably not be surprised that your primary goal is to build a boat. You do this mostly by clearing dungeons, which is generally accomplished by executing a variety of match-3's in an experience that mirrors an endless runner. You'll have a variety of ways to attack your enemies, you'll gather loot, and you'll use that loot to upgrade your ship. The dungeon goals feel a little tougher this time around. While this adds a welcome level of complexity (and hoarding spells to hurl at fireball at a frozen enemy does feel mighty fine), these more complicated goals can sometimes stall your experience. There was one dungeon objective which was so poorly explained that I was stuck for at least an hour before I finally Googled to find out what I was supposed to be doing. When a similarly difficult objective came again a little later, I didn't waste as much time before looking up the answer. Still, plenty of run goals are accomplished simply by entering the dungeon and matching away. As you upgrade your weapons, spells, and shield, you'll find allies to aid your journey and your runs will become longer as you master the matching mechanics.

You Must Build a Boat suffers from being extremely repetitive. You are going to be doing the same matches again and again. You will go through dungeons that all look fairly similar and face lots of similar enemies that want to kill you. It is a grind, and while it is well-executed, you will probably not be able to play the game in one sitting. My mouse hand grew numb during more than one play session, and the visual strain of staring at the screen to discern matches can be tiring. Still, I absolutely recommend the experience for its high level of creativity and clever execution. I have always enjoyed endless runners, and this is among the best of them.

You've seen all the game has to offer in the first 5 minutes.

You know what you're getting into. Don't let yourself fall into the trap.

Love yourself, I say. Love yourself.

Perhaps history fans will enjoy 7 Wonders: The Treasures of the Seven more than I did. The whole game comes across as a chore, as you attempt to reconstruct famous historical sites. It is a simple match-3 affair, which involves creating a match of every tile on the board. Then, once all tiles have been used, a 7 drops down and must be painfully navigated from one end of the board to another. The 7 will have to traverse narrow channels by way of you matching blocks to remove them from the 7's way, and although this seems to be the "hook" of the game, it is annoying. As you're making matches in vain to hopefully get the blocks you need, you'll soon wish you were playing a game more entertaining.

Pass on this one. There are better time wasters out there.

While Skilltree Saga seems initially compelling, the novelty wears off when the game reveals its true face. As other reviewers have noted, it feels like a mobile game.

The storyline is extremely sparce; you're rescuing some girl from some monster or other, some stranger suddenly decides to train you in magic, and off you go. You'll perform the same battles countless times, marginally increasing your stats and abilities, slowly looting or buying your armor and weapons, and crawlingly moving through the three maps in the game.

The first map has 30 stages, and in order to clear it, you must beat all 30 stages in one go. You won't be able to do that for a while. You have to keep grinding. And that's when you discover the game is a massive grind-fest. You'll keep slogging through, hoping for random healing fountains to heal you so you can keep pushing on without returning to town, because you will return to town a lot. You hope you'll loot useful equipment or find for free the expensive potions you can buy in the game. You won't be able to clear those 30 levels at once. Not by a long shot.

And when you get to the next area? Oh, it has 60 levels. The last area? 100. You will perform the same tasks hundreds of time with little variation, trying to manage your tiny and expensive pool of resources to hopefully clear the entire area in one sitting. Sound fun? It's really not.

The game isn't available on mobile devices, which surprises me, because it feels like it was aiming for mobile and somehow missed, landed on Steam, and tried to put its best face forward, pretending all the while it was entirely unaware of its hampered design.

If you've played The Happy Hereafter, Virtual Villagers, or Gemini Lost, you will feel right at home directing the doings of your little burgeoning colony. There are tons of resources to gather, buildings to build and upgrade, and a good variety of areas to explore. You'll gradually manage more and more colonists with varying abilities as you explore the map and make the most of all the land has to offer, as you quest for the fabled Fountain of Happiness.

What surprised me most about the game is an the addition of "pirate battles," which really play more like rounds of Angry Birds. There are 12 of these stages, and they are satisfying and welcome diversions. I could have easily enjoyed many, many more of these battles, but really, the bulk of the game is spent building your colony through gathering and trade.

The Promised Land is a much better game that you might think it would be. Yes, it's casual fare, and it's at the top of its class.